If the first victim of war is truth, then the first victim of Covid-19 was a sense of proportion. The pandemic continues to dominate the news every waking hour, as well as continuing to restrict our lives in ways not seen since wartime – in some ways even more severely. Yet how many people even noticed this week when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced that the estimated number of deaths globally from measles climbed to 207,500 in 2019, a 50 per cent increase on 2016? The news was hardly reported. Unless you happened to be visiting the CDCs, or the WHO’s website you were unlikely even to find out.
On sheer death toll alone, Covid-19 has killed more people this year than measles – approximately five times as many. The total Covid victims recorded by WHO so far is 1.29 million. Yet there are two very big differences.
Firstly, while Covid is mainly carrying off the old and already-sick – the average age of a victim in Britain is 82 – the vast majority of last year’s 200,000 measles victims were previously healthy children.
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